DataMules Blog

The Grid Mule - An Introduction

Welcome to the first installment of our blog. I thought I'd kick things off by
giving you a background on our project and fill you in on what we're trying to
accomplish. If you haven't seen our main site, we'd love for you to take a
look.

So ... we are creating a financial modeling tool. Why, you might ask, is such
a tool necessary when we have tools as flexible as
Excel or as powerful as
Matlab? Well, for us, it boils down to 3 things:

Tools like Excel (OpenOffice, etc.), while
extremely flexible and easy to get started with, are inherently error prone
and difficult to audit. The problem lies in the fact that spreadsheet
management and use has not really changed since
VisiCalc was invented over 30 years
ago. Sure, the interface has gotten better - but everything is still done
by referencing columns and rows (e.g., formulas are created by entering text
like "=A1+B1") rather than something more meaningful. This would be like
programmers still programming in assembly language. We'd like to provide
you more powerful tools so you can manage your information at a higher level
of abstraction. So instead of thinking in terms of "A1" through "A12", you
can think in terms of "revenue" for months 1 to 12.

Tools like Matlab (or SAS,
R, etc.), while extremely powerful, are too
difficult to use. They are at their core programming languages, not tools
intended to be used by everyday financial analysts. But they do provide you
with ways to manage information that are much more powerful than most
spreadsheet tools offer. For example, you can create a vector of revenue,
a vector of cost of goods sold and then create a formula for gross
profit that equals revenue - cost of goods sold. We'll have similar
functionality in a more familiar interface.

Specialized tools (e.g., Prophix or Budget
Maestro for budgeting) are generally not flexible
enough. They try to provide a structured environment where you get the
benefits of security, constrained input, etc. but they miss the boat when it
comes to flexibility. Rather than typing in a formula or using an interface
that is fast and people are used to, they create drop down menus that are
too limiting and cumbersome to be effective.

So for us, we are trying to build something that is:

In upcoming posts, I'll talk about how we attack each one and specific problems
that are solved by our approach. I think it will become clear fairly quickly
why you should be using our technology for your modeling needs.